What Hunger

This is not a tale where the girl is running away from danger - instead, she is the danger. It's the summer before high school and Ronny Nguyen is too young for work and too old for cartoons. Instead, she spends her days falling asleep to trashy magazines on a plastic lawn chair in her small backyard.

She's a stark contrast to her older brother Tommy, her immigrant parents' pride and joy. Ronny can't bear to think about what it will be like when Tommy, with whom she's always been close, goes to college and leaves her alone with Me and Ba in their quiet house. Their parents never speak of their childhoods or families in Vietnam, except in the context of food: thick spring rolls with slim and salty nem nuong; bright yellow rice noodles called mi quang, steaming bowls of pho tai with thin, delicate slices of blood-red beef floating on top.

In the aftermath of the war, Me and Ba explained, meat became dangerous. Ronny and Tommy must never take their lives - or their food - for granted. Well, Ronny never had much of an appetite for meat, and life on the wrong side of the highway in a white suburb has never been easy.

But then tragedy strikes, and everything Ronny thought she knew about herself or her life, changes in an instant. A few nights later at her first high school party, a boy does not take no for answer and suddenly Ronny is overtaken by a force, an urge, larger than herself. As Ronny comes into her own power, she discovers a new taste for life that is poised to save her, even as it threatens to destroy everything and everyone around her.

"Whether it took days, or months, or years, I would come for him. And I would savour the moment."